“Women, Sex & Desire” @ University at Albany PAC, 2/21/13

ALBANY – Gesel Mason Performance Project’s “Women, Sex & Desire,” onstage Thursday night at the University at Albany Performing Arts Center, is a mashup of serious dance/theater, a 200-member encounter group and a fabulous night out with the gals.

Combining movement, stories, snippets of videotaped interviews (with both students and former prostitutes) and audience participation, the hour-long work seems designed, more than anything else, to get a conversation started. And it does: Just a quarter of the way in, many of the nearly 200 people in the sold-out theater were bravely sharing secrets with their neighbors (or so it appeared). Mason got them started with a short questionnaire left on each seat that asked them to finish sentences beginning with phrases like “I want you to…,” “I wish…” and “I fantasize about…”

What made it possible for friends and strangers to so quickly open up on such a sensitive topic was the honesty and courage with which Mason and her four fellow dancers approached the subject matter. Baring their souls—and their breasts—they succeeded (for the most part) in striking a delicate balance between humor and gravity, “issues” and art. (A show subtitled “Sometimes You Feel Like a Ho, Sometimes You Don’t” clearly isn’t taking itself too seriously).

One example: early in the show, Kim Howard, creator of the one-woman show “Essence Revealed: A Stripper Memoir,” delivered a moving monologue about the conflict between empowerment and victimization that can come with being a sex object. But it was a whole different Howard who rocked the finale in a purple gown that she peeled off one Velcro-ed strip at a time, obviously having a blast.

The dancing—set to music by Beyoncé, Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye and others—was notable not so much for its choreography but rather for its emotional content and the lovely, individual movement styles of each woman. Taiwanese dancer Ching-I Chang is like a tensile wire, all edges and angles as she wraps herself around Courtney Cooke in a love duet. The voluptuous Kayla Hamilton moves as slinkily as the silk she wears. Carly Berrett made herself almost painfully vulnerable through both her words and her body, particularly in a section in which she repeatedly throws herself against a table and then the floor. Mason’s solo, performed blindfolded and nude in dappled light, is more soulful than sexy.

“Women, Sex & Desire” just begins to scratch the surface of its multifaceted topic, but what it lacks in depth, it makes up for with good intentions. By revealing parts of themselves that are usually hidden, and inviting viewers to make a few revelations of their own, Mason and her dancers cast light in places that have been shadowed for too long.